Posted on 05/05/2004 9:57:17 PM PDT by Pikamax
Tensions rise in a Michigan town John Leland NYT Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Broadcasts of Muslim call to prayer anger many residents
HAMTRAMCK, Michigan To hear people in this blue-collar town tell it, things were fine until the al-Islah Islamic Center petitioned to broadcast its call to prayer, or azan, over an outdoor loudspeaker.
Masud Khan, the mosque's secretary, sat on the carpeted floor one day last week and reflected on what he had learned about some of his neighbors in the last few months. "How much they hate us," he said softly.
Jackie Rutherford, a librarian and youth worker, sat on her front stoop watching three men in Islamic shirt-dresses at the house across the street. "I don't know what's going to happen to our little town," said Rutherford, 39.
"I used to say I wasn't prejudiced against anyone, but then I realized I had a problem with them putting Allah above everyone else," she said, of the plan to amplify the call to prayer, which mosques announce five times a day. "It's throwing salt in a wound. I feel they've come to our country, infiltrated it, and they sit there looking at us, laughing, calling us fools."
For the population of Hamtramck, a city of 23,000 surrounded by Detroit, the battle of the loudspeaker, which the City Council approved on Tuesday, has revealed a crossfire of religious, ethnic and lifestyle grievances, aggravated by the lingering memories of Sept. 11, 2001, which left many Muslims here feeling they were under suspicion.
Once an enclave of Polish immigrants, Hamtramck has since the 1990s become a haven for immigrants from Bangladesh, Yemen, Pakistan, Bosnia and other countries, including a large Muslim population. In the 2000 census, 41 percent of the city's population was born outside the United States.
On spring afternoons, the sidewalks of Joseph Campau Avenue echo snatches of Polish, Bengali, Arabic and hip hop, punctuated by the sound of bells from several Catholic churches. Three mosques have opened in the last few years, increasing in size while the congregations at neighboring Roman Catholic churches dwindle.
Yet for all this churn, the ethnic populations coexisted with little overt friction.
"Even after 9/11, we had no problems," said Abdul Motlib, the president of the al-Islah mosque, which serves a mostly Bangladeshi membership (the other two mosques are primarily Bosnian or Yemeni).
Then last year, Motlib applied for approval to amplify the call to prayer, a sonorous invocation in Arabic that lasts up to two minutes.
For some longtime residents, like Joanne Golen, 68, who described herself as a born-again Christian, the request crossed a line. Golen said she had always gotten along well with the Bangladeshi families in her neighborhood. She noted that at Easter one of her new neighbors brought her a turkey that he had gotten at work. But she said the call to prayer was too much.
"My main objection is simple," she said. "I don't want to be told that Allah is the true and only God five times a day, 365 days a year. It's against my constitutional rights to have to listen to another religion evangelize in my ear."
At City Hall last week, before the final vote on the loudspeaker, a crowd of more than 100 crammed into a room, with dozens more listening or arguing in the hallway outside.
Chuck Schultz, 49, a computer programmer from nearby Grosse Pointe, spoke against the measure.
"Everyone talks about their rights," Schultz said. "The rights of Christians have been stripped from them. Last week, there were Muslims praying downstairs, in a public building. If Christians tried to do that, the ACLU would shut us down."
Some residents complained about the potential noise. Others, like Veronica Wojtowicz, 81, reminded neighbors of a time when life in Hamtramck was simpler.
"My parents came to this country and worked hard," Wojtowicz said. "I think the grace belongs on the other side. The intolerance doesn't come from the people who object; it comes from the other side. We all lived in peace and had no problems. You moved too fast."
In response, Abdul Latef, the imam at Masjid Al-Falah, a mosque in Detroit, asked the community to be patient.
"You can make history," Al-Falah said.
"This is part of our religion. If it is too noisy, then you can complain, and they will stop it forever."
Council members emphasized that there was nothing technically preventing the mosque from amplifying its call to prayer, even without amending the city's noise ordinance, and compared the amplification to the chiming of church bells.
The amendment just gave government officials leverage to limit the volume and hours of the broadcasts, said Councilman Scott Klein.
Motlib said the mosque had applied for approval "because we want to be good neighbors."
Paradoxically, the call to prayer is one that even most of the Muslims at al-Islah mosque cannot understand, because they speak Bengali rather than Arabic, said Khan, the mosque secretary.
Yet for many Muslims in town, the dispute seemed less about noise or the content of the azan than about insecurities of an older immigrant population feeling threatened by a newer one.
"They see we are coming more and more, and they think we are taking their city," said Abusayed Mahfuz, 34, the editor of Bangla Amar, a local Bengali magazine and Web site. "It's not really a religious problem. It's about migration, which is a reality."
Musad, who moved to Hamtramck from New York in 1999, said he understood the insecurity.
"It's human nature," he said. "You feel an invasion. It could happen to me also."
Like others in his mosque, Musad said, he was drawn to the Muslim community here not for its engagement with the rest of America, but for its distance.
"What attracted me was seeing school girls with veils and burkas," he said. "It's more authentic here than in New York, more roots. There's village life."
The New York Times
Assimilation versus non-assimilation, versus forced assimilation. It seems Islam only goes for option 2 or 3. And number 3 is when they are doing the forcing.
Good ngiht.
"What attracted me was seeing school girls with veils and burkas," he said. "It's more authentic here than in New York, more roots. There's village life."
To each his own
We are being invaded and our own stupid laws on immigration are the culprit.
"I used to say I wasn't prejudiced against anyone, but then I realized I had a problem with them putting Allah above everyone else," she said, of the plan to amplify the call to prayer, which mosques announce five times a day. "It's throwing salt in a wound. I feel they've come to our country, infiltrated it, and they sit there looking at us, laughing, calling us fools."
And you know the sun's settin' fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
'Cause your heart's bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can't you see the sun's settin' down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.
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